About Expenses

An expense is a record of a cost incurred to run your handmade business. For most handmade businesses, the majority of your expenses will be related to the materials you buy to create your products. Craftybase however is powerful enough to also track your overheads costs like rent, or indirect expenses such as office and shipping supplies.

When you add an expense to account for a purchase of your materials, Craftybase will automatically increase the stock levels of the material purchased by the amount in the expense. It will also then recalculate your real-time unit costs to factor in the newly purchased stock.

You can add many different materials to the same expense in Craftybase - this is perfect for situations where you buy many materials from the same supplier. In this case, any shipping costs or discounts applied to the overall order will be factored into the cost for each material purchased.

Note: Expenses are not designed to handle the actual usage of materials in creating your finished items. To do this, you'll want to create a manufacture containing the materials you have used. This will automatically calculate your material costs, and adjust your material inventory by the exact amount used in creating the item.

Expenses can be added manually, or (for non-material expenses) you can import multiple expenses in bulk.

Material expenses are for costs associated with buying materials you use to create your products. 

When you add a material expense to account for a purchase of your materials, Craftybase will automatically increase the stock levels of the material purchased by the amount in the expense. It will also then recalculate your real-time unit costs to factor in the newly purchased stock.

To add a material expense, ensure that you select the "Material" category when adding a new expense line item to your expense. This will then prompt you to select or create a material that the expense relates to.

See our Introduction to Material Expenses tutorial for a runthrough on how to add your first material expense →

Overhead expenses

Expenses for your business that are not directly related to a product or order (e.g. rent, utilities and subscriptions) can also be tracked in Craftybase. These are known as "Overhead" expenses (however are also commonly referred to as indirect or general expenses)

To add an overhead expense:

1. Navigate to your Add Expense page and click the Add Expense Item button.
2. In the Add Expense Line Item window that appears, select a non material Expense Category (i.e. Other)
3. Enter the cost and quantity of your overhead expense then click the Add button
4. Once you have completed entering all the details of the Expense, click the Save expense button to save.

Expense categories

Each one of the expenses you add to Craftybase can be classified with a specific category. This allows you to group together your costs to make tallying and reporting simple. It also allows Craftybase to know when an expense should be added to your inventory and COGS totals. Learn more about expense categories here →

Mileage expenses

While Craftybase does not have specific mileage tracking features, you can add any expenses incurred due to mileage (such as monies paid for gas) as an indirect expense. 

Recurring expenses

We do not currently provide the ability to schedule recurring expenses, however you may wish to use our Copy Expense feature to quickly clone existing expenses. More details about this feature can be found here:

How do I copy an Expense?